Paul O'Connell: Towards the end, I got it right

Even after he’d won two Heineken Cups, when he was the man a province and a country would look to for leadership, Paul O’Connell insists he didn’t have his own head right. How good could he have been had he won that battle earlier?

We tend to forget it now, and he’d nearly forgotten too, but only for a key conversation, Paul O’Connell’s career would have ended in 2012. His back was killing him. He had only played two games in six months. Had he listened, his body was telling him it was time to go. He was 33, a two-time Heineken Cup winner, a 2009 Grand Slam winner, a Lions captain, his legendary status assured. What else had he to prove? Why bother putting himself through any more unnecessary anguish?

But as O’Connell tells in his new autobiography, The Battle, he did seek a second opinion: from a surgeon in London, Damian Fahy. Their meeting wasn’t televised. Ryle Nugent or Michael Corcoran weren’t excitedly relaying what happened like they would another lineout or match O’Connell had grabbed out of sheer will and personality as much as stunning technique and physique. Ryle and Michael weren’t there. You weren’t there. And so none of us asked him about it the way he’d be constantly asked about those big games and trophies won in Cardiff.